Shikihime Garden

Shikihime Garden is a Flash gardening slash card deck building game with cutesy anime cards and a lot of casual stuff to do out of battle. It can be described as a crossover between Tamagochi and a generic trading card game.

In Shikihime Garden, cards are not just some abstract monsters in your deck—they’re living creatures, called Shikihime (mostly female anime characters), that live in your garden. This creates some sort of attachment to your card deck, because as you create your garden the Shikihime interact and spar with one another, munching down rice balls to get well after a tough fight. The fights themselves are rather monotonous, and even though this is a card game there are no battle animations, or strategies for that matter. Building your deck carefully is important, however. Players get to explore a colorful world and tinker around with cards, combining lesser cards to acquire stronger ones. To top it off, there are social features, like guilds and ‘check out my garden’ exchanges as well.

Shikihime Garden can be quite a treat to the casual player. This game was designed thoughtfully, and even though progress is slow, the weird combination somehow manages to create an experience that’s captivating and fun even in the long run.